


Eternity

by Silverlight8



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: (kinda), Angst, Canon Compliant, Extended Canon, Flashbacks, Gen, No shipping, POV Third Person, POV Tommy, all characters aside from Tommy and Alex are only mentioned once, ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 17:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14025300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverlight8/pseuds/Silverlight8
Summary: They say it lasted a week. It felt like an eternity.





	Eternity

They say it lasted a week. It felt like an eternity.

The soldiers are trapped on the beach waiting for the German planes to come and pick them off, waiting for the inevitable whine of the engines overhead, waiting for the whistle as the bombs are dropped. Waiting for that moment when they die, shot in the back, maybe—or more probably, a bomb dropped on their heads as they crouch in the sand, helpless, a horrible blinding flash of pain and then nothing—nothing when chunks of their bloody flesh are flying through the air, mixed with sand and other soldiers’ bodies, gone, just like that. Faceless. Faceless because they’re just one of thousands, millions, maybe, who are shot or bombed or drowned and then become nothing.

Tommy is crouching in the sand just like every other soldier on the beaches of Dunkirk, listening to the bombs drop down closer and closer to him—explosion after explosion, rapid-fire—and then, just before they reach him, there’s silence. For one, disbelieving second, he expects the pain, the nothingness. Sand rains down on him, sand and things he doesn’t want to think about, but when nothing else happens, he knows that he’s safe. For now. He lifts his head, carefully, and sees soldiers surrounding him, most standing now, weary and exhausted. And then there are the injured ones, or the dead ones, he’s not sure which, lying broken and bleeding in the sand.

He scrambles to his feet, looking around. The German plane is gone, but it’ll be back. And next time, it might be his number up, his body lying broken on the sand, dead or dying. He shakes his head. He can’t afford to think like that here—where people are dropping like flies being swatted by the Germans, where what they want most of all is to go home. And so does he. What he wants more than anything is to go home. To survive.

Survival out here isn’t determined by much. It’s all gut instinct, and that’s just as likely to be wrong than right. Everybody’s going to die eventually, whether by a German bullet or old age, and maybe there isn’t any use in trying to survive. But he’s got to try, and right now his gut is telling him to move.

***

Later on, all he’ll remember are flashes. Flashes of bombs dropping, of beaches, of ships and sand and drowning. And then the little ship that picked him up out of the ocean, the boy in the red sweater— _no_ , he can’t be a boy, he must be Tommy’s own age, but Tommy feels so _old_ all of the sudden –and he remembers things in crystal clarity. That gut-wrenching relief when he’s dragged aboard drenched in oily water, and when he sees the man with the strangely familiar pair of green eyes nod at him from across the cabin. It hits him then: he’s going home. He’s going to go on a train and he’s going to go home and his mother will cry when she sees him, so thin, and his dad will stand back slightly but tell him that he’s proud of him, with tears sparkling in his eyes. Everything will be normal. Life will go on.

But even in the cabin of the boat, he feels a lurch of uneasiness. No, things won’t be the same. He’ll have those guns ringing in his ears and he’ll see that poor drowned man—one of his flashes—and he’ll have to go back to war and it won’t be the same. _He_ won’t be the same.

He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Again he’s thinking too much. He shakes his head slightly to clear his disquiet (it doesn’t work) and he heads up the ladder to maybe catch a glimpse of home. To convince himself everything will be alright.

***

The first of his flashes to torment him: the moment when the first torpedo smashed through the destroyer’s hull, and the water began pouring through the gaping hole in the side, and he was suddenly drowning, or so it seemed like—the water surrounding him, blinding him, making his lungs burn, choking him. There was a flash of blinding panic and he couldn’t move at all, but then he saw a hint of light above him, and he was struggling then, struggling up through the water and the bodies, the green-eyed man behind him. He broke through the surface of the water and he sucked in the sweetest gulp of air he’d ever known, and that was when he knew he wasn’t going to die. He’d had a lot of those moments recently, but this one was the most keenly felt, the most relieved he’d ever been.

Then the crashing realization came that their ship was sinking behind them, the one that was supposed to take them home. Sudden dread filled him as he tried to climb into a lifeboat and they pushed him away— _you’ll capsize the boat,_ they said, _you’ll kill us all_ —and then that quiet soldier from the beach threw them a line and they were being towed back to Dunkirk beach, the green-eyed man and himself, and he realized, as they staggered back onto the sand and collapsed in the surf, that this was eternity.

_***_

Somehow, on the train ride through the countryside with the green-eyed man (who’s pretending to be asleep, but he’s awake as well), Tommy can’t stop thinking of the moment when they finally disembarked and felt solid ground beneath their feet again—not sand, not Dunkirk beach. Home. But it didn’t feel like home. He’d been expecting less people; he’d thought, somehow, that he and the green-eyed man (Alex, his name turned out to be) would be alone at the dock, alone in their relief. He hadn’t expected to reach dry land and be swept off into a sea of soldiers. There was no celebration in the air; they were all wandering, heads down, all so tired. He was tired as well, he realized, once he’d come off the boat and found himself shuffling along with everybody else. Aimlessly wandering, and he wanted nothing more than to _sleep_.

Somehow he made it to the train and found a seat across from Alex, and suddenly—he’d survived, he realized, he’d survived. _How long did it take?_ he asked himself, and he found with dull surprise that he didn’t know. A week, a month, it was all the same, all in flashes. A chill passed through him, and the exhaustion disappeared. The train moved through the night, and occasional lights flickered past the window, and he stayed awake, thinking, _How long? How long?_

***

More flashes go through his mind now, faster and faster. The terrifying race through the village, gunshots all around him (when he wasn’t counting yet—and all the same it takes forever); the tense, interminable hours (was it hours?) spent at the bottom of the Dutch trawler, pressed uncomfortably against a coil of ropes; the look on Alex’s face when he had the rifle pressed to Gibson’s chest (was it his name?), that concealed panic (was it panic?); and out of everything, the drowned man—oh, he sees a lot of the drowned man. He walked straight into the surf, and nothing could express the numb, endless wait as well as that.

The drowned man couldn’t stand the eternity. And now the empty surf crashing on that bloody beach haunts Tommy’s dreams.

***

He sees light. He opens his eyes and there’s sunlight streaming in through the window, glorious early-morning sunlight. He straightens up slowly, blinking, and he sees grass and neighbouring train tracks; out of the corner of his eye he sees Alex awaken and hears him calling for a newspaper through the window. A little boy next to the train hands him one, and Alex grabs it and sits back down heavily, scanning the front page. Tommy watches as his face crumples into a grimace; Alex shoves the paper away from him. “I can’t look,” he mutters, and Tommy sees the headline, upside down. DUNKIRK EVACUATION MAJOR MILITARY DISASTER, it reads, and Tommy feels a bit sick himself. “Go on, you read it,” Alex says, and Tommy finds himself reaching for it, turning it right-side up again. He finds the article and begins reading, hesitantly; he doesn’t want to know what all the people back in England think about him—they’ll think he’s a coward, won’t they? Him and Alex and every other soldier on the beaches of Dunkirk. _All we did is survive,_ he vaguely remembers Alex saying after the Moonstone, and Tommy feels those words nestle inside him, freezing him in the pit of his stomach. _Survival isn’t good enough for them_ , he’s thinking, _survival wasn’t good enough_ —but if it wasn’t, then why didn’t he feel it? On the beach it was all he could think about, all everyone wanted (just reach England, they thought, just find a ship, find the beach, don’t get killed) and now. . .

He lays the paper back on the table (has he been reading this whole time?) and his hands are shaking, just barely—he looks up at Alex with everything roiling through him, and it must show up on his face, because Alex is giving him the same look. _Isn’t it over?_ he asks himself fiercely, and he says it out loud, too: “Isn’t it over?” It’s very quiet, but Alex must understand, because he shakes his head, almost imperceptibly; Tommy closes his eyes, trying to block out more flashes, when the train whistle blows and they pull into the station.

***

There are people outside the train, and Tommy hears something that sounds like cheering, but it barely reaches him. Somehow he’s still asking himself, _how long?_ Even though the newspaper says it’s been a week, it’s so much longer than that – it must be so much longer.

Even now the flashes are coming, but it’s not the end. Alex is pulling him out of his seat, and he’s stepping out into the crowd of people below, squinting into the sun. Everybody’s around him, it seems, and the shouting is almost loud enough for him to want to put his hands over his ears. He hears the screaming suddenly, and he’s back on the sinking ship, with the rush of water drowning them out—and he’s trying to stop the sounds, stop the screaming, when he finally reaches open space.

 He’s wandered free of the crowd now, and he’s standing further down the platform. The sun is warming him, and he’s starting to feel warm beneath his scratchy wool uniform. He’d forgotten how tired he’d been. The broken cries recede into the distance.

Someone breaks away from the mob and start to walk toward him. It’s Alex, and he’s _smiling_. “Come on now, we don’t want to miss the next train,” he says, but all Tommy can think is, _Did you forget? Have you forgotten already?_ But he doesn’t say anything. Now he realizes that the cheering from behind him is for _them_ —but why? Don’t they know how he ran, how he dropped his rifle and ran for the beach, lied and _cheated_ his way home? But of course they don’t. _Have you forgotten already?_ It’s only been a week—a week, he can’t believe it; it seems so close but so far away already—and the memories are weighing him down. Tommy follows Alex back into the crowd, and he can barely hear them as they climb onto the next train, the train that will take him back home. He hears the crash of the ocean, he hears the explosions from the sand, and Alex must sense it again, because they settle down into their seats (already the train is filling up) and he’s giving Tommy a strange look that he can’t decipher. _So tired,_ he thinks, _so tired,_ and as the train begins moving, leaving the crowds behind, he sleeps.

***

He dreams of ships and sand, and a broken body in the corner of boat (just a boy), and hopelessness and screaming and dark water swallowing him. Of burning.

And then he dreams of being nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Dedicated to my wonderful beta/editor MidshipmanWarburton.


End file.
